Ted Nelson in Herzog's "Lo and Behold"

"Amazingly, Herzog concludes that Ted is the only sane person in the computer field." [▶ this video] At the time Ted conceived his visionary ideas, the magazines were full of pictures of guys in suits standing in front of secretaries typing into screenless hardware, and business machines with racks of IBM tape-reels. There was little non-corporate networking (except for the beginnings of PLATO), and only dreamers talked of making all information available to everyone. Wikipedia is a kludge by comparison.

Ted Nelson who coined the term _hypertext_ in _1963_ claimed in Werner Herzog’s documentary “Lo and Behold” that his original idea for “copy and paste” would always link back to the original. This article below based on the Herzog interview has more context but not the exact _quote_ (context pun intended) that I remember from the documentary. Full interview of Ted Nelson from “Lo and Behold”: ▶ this video > Nelson, who was featured in Werner Herzog’s latest film, Lo and Behold, believes that instead of the existing formats we use online, where text often mirrors the constraints of paper, we should have a system of two-way links that would allow readers to see the context of any quotation... > There are a few offline examples, such as the Talmud and the Rosetta Stone, where text is read side-by-side. Nelson believes this is how online documents should be constructed. > “As far as I’m concerned, this is the way literature should develop,” he says. “I don’t consider this technology, I think it’s literature. Being able to see visible connections between pages seems to me absolutely fundamental.” > Nelsons says this setup would be the ideal format for reading annotations, additional details, correspondence, and disagreements: “It’s essentially a different genre of writing.” > As Nelson sees it, our current use of online documents is very limiting. He’s particularly disturbed by how we use the words cut and paste. When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, cut came to mean “hide this piece that I’ve just marked in an invisible place,” and paste became “plug whatever’s in this invisible place to where I’m pointing.” > “To me that was an outrage because no one has yet got a decent re-arrangement system that allows you to see the all the parts of the arrangement as you’re writing,” Nelson says. “Those words meant something entirely different until 1984. > Balzac, the French novelist, carried a razor blade around his neck for cutting up his manuscript. Tolstoy would cut up his manuscripts and leave all the pieces around the floor. This is true cut-and-paste, where you’re re-arranging on a large scale and able to see the relationships between parts.” > Ironically, Nelson is friends with Larry Tesler—the man responsible for our modern use of cut and paste—but still calls their mislabeling “a crime against humanity.” link link

My read was similar, I also couldn’t get through Lo and Behold which set off bullshit alarms [0] and just gave me the impression of confidence being used in the place of actual explanation. It feels like an emperor has no clothes situation. For some reason people think it signals high status or intellectualism to like Herzog so they say they do. I haven’t watched all of his movies so this may be unfairly harsh, but that was my initial impression. Portal podcast also came across that way to me. First interview with Thiel was interesting, but I stopped somewhere after the next couple. Too much “the media doesn’t want us to talk about this” and “the Clintons are a globalist conspiracy against the people”. If you have real arguments then make them. Don’t just confidently state things as fact without backing them up. Thankfully when Sam Harris was on he at least pushed back on some of the bullshit. [0]: ▶ this video

There's someone who definitely spent a lot of time on this, definitely check out Ted Nelson's ZigZag structure: link It is exactly that, an attempt to structure data in a similar way that our thoughts are formed. I believe it was this video where he shortly explained that concept; ▶ this video Although it might be a different video since Ted Nelson is all over the place with his documents and videos.